Two great stories
First - Malthusians and doom-sayers are always wrong - from The Washington Post:
Countries made only modest climate-change promises in Paris. They’re falling short anyway.
Barely two years ago, after weeks of intense bargaining in Paris, leaders from 195 countries announced a global agreement that once had seemed impossible. For the first time, the nations of the world would band together to reduce humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels in an effort to hold off the most devastating effects of climate change.
“History will remember this day,” the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said amid a backdrop of diplomats cheering and hugging.
Two years later, the euphoria of Paris is colliding with the reality of the present.
Heh - the bloom is off the rose. Everyone loves to virtue signal but to actually DO SOMETHING? The very idea gives them a case of the vapors. Buried deep in the article is this admission:
“More than two decades ago, the world agreed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in our air to prevent dangerous climate outcomes,” said Rob Jackson, an energy and climate expert at Stanford University, referring to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change that set international negotiations in motion. “To date, we have failed.”
They said that the earth was nearing a "tipping point" and we would have runaway warming if we didn't strictly curtail our activities. All the fancy charts are based on computer models and not actual data. Look at the actual data and we have not warmed in about 20 years.
Second - this little bombshell:
Global land use change responsible for a significant portion of global warming says study
From the EUROPEAN COMMISSION JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE and the “Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. was right” department. I suspect a whole bunch of climate models that don’t take this into consideration, and think CO2 is the dominant climate driver, are going to need to be revised.
Land use change has warmed the Earth’s surface
Natural ecosystems play a crucial role in helping combat climate change, air pollution and soil erosion. A new study by a team of researchers from the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, sheds light on another, less well-known aspect of how these ecosystems, and forests in particular, can protect our planet against global warming.
The research team used satellite data to analyse changes in global vegetation cover from 2000 to 2015 and link these to changes in the surface energy balance. Modifying the vegetation cover alters the surface properties – such as the amount of heat dissipated by water evaporation and the level of radiation reflected back into space – which has a knock-on effect on local surface temperature. Their analysis reveals how recent land cover changes have ultimately made the planet warmer.
“We knew that forests have a role in regulating surface temperatures and that deforestation affects the climate, but this is the first global data-driven assessment that has enabled us to systematically map the biophysical mechanisms behind these processes”, explains Gregory Duveiller, lead author of the study.
I bet that land use is not even considered in most of the models. Talk about not having a good grasp of what is actually happening out there. The full paper can be read online here: The mark of vegetation change on Earth’s surface energy balance
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